Meta

OpenSim 0.7.1 and More

Hi everyone,

We’ve updated our servers today with various backend stability improvements and made some changes that should help improve your user experience as well. Here’s what’s new:

OpenSim 0.7.1

Kitely is now using the release version of OpenSim 0.7.1. This version includes many bug fixes and features, such as Shared Media (a.k.a. Media on a Prim). For more information, see the OpenSim release notes.

Please note that in order to take advantage of Shared Media you’ll need a V2 viewer.

Email Required

We’re now asking for peoples’ email addresses when they open a Kitely account. If you already have a Kitely account, then the next time you login you’ll be asked to allow us to access the email address that you entered in your Facebook account.

The reason for this change is that we need a reliable way to be able to contact you. For example, there might be a problem with your account; or someone might have lodged a copyright-infringement complaint about some content that is associated with your account. Previously, we had intended to rely on Facebook Messages for contacting people, but we’ve found that this solution isn’t good enough, for several reasons. First, some people have disabled the ability to contact them via Facebook Messages. Second, if we need to contact multiple people then using Facebook Messages is extremely slow; emails work much better. Third, having your email address will enable us to communicate with you even if you can’t access Facebook for some reason. And finally, we intend to support additional signup methods in the near future (besides Facebook), so some people won’t even have a Facebook account at all.

We will only use this email address in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. We will not use it to send spam, or share your email with a third party without your consent.

World Templates

We currently offer two stock worlds that can be used as a starting point when creating a new world. We’ve made small changes to these worlds.

First, we replaced the “Empty Island” world with a world called “Empty Land”, which is a 256m x 256m square of flat terrain located just above sea-level. This is more useful as a starting point than the island, which was quite small.

Second, both of our world templates (“Empty Land” and “Virtual Collaboration Environment”) now have the sun fixed at the noon position. We’ve made this change to make these worlds more friendly to people who aren’t familiar with changing light conditions. We’ve been told that when new users enter a world, and see that everything is dark, they can sometimes become frustrated with the user experience.

Since this environment setting (“Fixed Sun”) can be changed, you can easily modify it if you wish.

Imprudence 1.3.2

We’ve updated the default viewer that we provide to people who don’t already have a viewer installed to the latest stable version of Imprudence (version 1.3.2).